Category: Laravel 4

Laravel 4 IoC – Bindings and the Application Instance

laravel 4 logoAt a recent business networking event I got talking to another web developer, who has just started using Laravel 4. We got chatting about Laravel in general and how awesome it is.Of course, the subject of IoC cropped up. The other developer commented on IoC, saying, “you need to be really careful with the IoC and passing an instance of the $app into the closure for performance reasons, the $app shouldn’t really be passed through at all ideally”. His argument also focused upon the fact that injecting the “Laravel 4 Facades” (config/app.php line 151) into controllers as it is faster.

Personally, I think he’d missed the point of IoC here. The only point he does have at a push, I assume, is if the object doesn’t need an instance of the $app, then don’t pass it through the closure – but that’s pretty obvious?

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Mailcatcher & Laravel 4 – Sending Development Emails

During application development sending test emails can usually be a pain, even when using a modern frmaework like the excellent Laravel 4. During development it is very desirable to debug emails without actually sending them.There are a few options I’ve come across:

  1. Use Laravel 4’s Mail pretend feature. Simply set the configuration key “pretend” to true in app/config/mail.php. Laravel will now not send emails, instead write the content of each email to the application log
  2. Manually change the “to” email to your own so emails are delivered to your favourite email client – again, messy if sending lots of emails and if you ever made a mistake
  3. Print out the email data directly to the screen, but don’t send the actual email – the worst solution in my opinion

Options 2 and 3 are particularly fraught with issues. For instance, assume the application was to send out 1000 member renewal reminders and during development the route that sends out the emails was hit. Very soon, we’d have some very real (and confused, annoyed etc.) customers contacting you – disaster!

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Route Patterns in Laravel 4

When using the excellent Laravel 4, writing DRY and SOLID code is something you’re well aware of. Unfortunately, it’s common for the routes file to get messy and repetitive as an application grows – enter the route pattern method. Even worse (in my opinion) is performing basic and repetitive validation of parameters in controllers.

Consider a routes file that responds to 4 simple URIs:

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Laravel 4 Database Seeding with Faker

Database seeding can be a pain to perform and end up very clumsy. Seeding is a process required in the majority of web applications – either for stress testing or just to generate a reasonable sample of test data during testing. Laravel 4 already has database seeding and migrations built in, which of course is great. However, the functionality to generate the actual sample data is lacking. Enter Faker – a package, available via composer. The author describes this better than I can:

Faker is a PHP library that generates fake data for you. Whether you need to bootstrap your database, create good-looking XML documents, fill-in your persistence to stress test it, or anonymize data taken from a production service, Faker is for you.

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